The Confessions Of Isabella
by Isobel Morgan
Summary: Father William of Nottingham reflects on the sins of his charges


I'm a bit of a newcomer to this version of Robin Hood, so sorry for anything that isn't quite in line with how things are in the show!

**The Confessions Of Isabella**

I kneel before the altar and pray.

"_Lord, it is I, Father William. Forgive my arrogance, my pride in questioning your divine will. But I must beg for intercession on the behalf of one of your flock. A lamb that becomes more lost each day; one I fear I no longer have a chance of saving. Her sins are many, that much I know, but with help, she could truly become a good person. There is much within her that is worth saving, but what she has suffered has all but broken her. Please, Lord. Guide me." _

I remain on my knees for a moment, then make the sign of the Cross and rise.

Turning to leave the chapel, my thoughts cannot turn away from the subject of my increasingly desperate prayers. When I was first sent here to become the new Sheriff's private chaplain, I believed that I could save her. But as her confessions to me began in earnest, as she opened her soul to me, I realised that this was not just a troubled young woman in a difficult position, but that Lady Isabella was truly sick.

When I was a young brother, back in the Abbey, I spent much time working with the sick, alongside my mentor, Father Gervase. He was a great man, learned and wise, and he had a good deal of experience in treating afflictions of the mind. There is much fear and superstitions that surrounds such afflictions, and many believe that they are untreatable, or that they should be because they are a punishment from God for a severe sin. But Father Gervase taught me to see otherwise, that such souls deserve understanding, patience and whatever help can be given. He also taught me to identify those whose affliction was caused by some event in their life; the girl who had been struck dumb after witnessing the brutal murder of her mother, the man who went wild and killed three men in a tavern had been driven into such madness by what he had seen and done on campaign as a soldier. He hanged for his crime, which was only right and just, but Father Gervase argued that if the man's sickness had been recognised earlier, perhaps he could have been helped, and the crime would never have taken place.

The first time I spoke with Lady Isabella, I realised that something was not quite right with her. Outwardly, she was a composed, intelligent woman, eager to take up her new post and to be the best Sheriff that Nottingham could have and for that I admired her – not many women I had encountered would be willing to take on such a burden, in the face of such opposition. But, even if I sensed that something dark lurked beneath this appearance, she seemed true and capable, and I believed her.

And then Squire Thornton arrived.

In the eyes of the law, he had every right to act as he did, and it was she who had committed the offence, both legal and to God, in abandoning her husband. But I saw how she crumbled in front of him, how she transformed from a confident, promising woman into a terrified, helpless young girl trapped in a nightmare.

I saw how he treated her, how he took pleasure in dominating and terrorising her, and how this drove her further into the darkness that I later learned threatened to overwhelm her. She wouldn't let me see her when he was there, and he dismissed my request to hear his confession with scorn and derision, but from what information I managed to gather, I believe that she killed him rather than submit to him again.

The murder she confessed to me, (although officially she placed the blame on the outlaw, Robin Hood), but she insisted it was self defence, that he had meant to kill her and would have had she not wrested the blade from his hand and turned it on him. I didn't confront her directly on this, but I asked her, as gently as I could, over and over, to tell me what happened. I did not believe that a man such as Squire Thornton could be so easily defeated by someone in the grip of such destabilizing terror. She began to confess to me, then, what her life had been when she lived as his wife, what manner of things he had done to her.

She had been married to him at thirteen, a marriage that her elder brother had arranged following the death of their parents, in order to save the family. I saw nothing unusual in this; well-bred maidens are often used as barter by their family, seeking to raise themselves or improve their fortunes, and as the head of the family, her brother was only doing what any man would when he could not support her himself.

His choice of groom, however, was not merely unfortunate, but devastating in its consequences. Did he know that, rather than saving his sister by marrying her to a man who had the money to look after her as he himself couldn't, he was in fact destroying her? Did he know how cruel a man his sister's husband-to-be was when he agreed to the match? That he would spent the entirety of the marriage belittling and terrorising his young wife?

At thirteen, with no mother or sister to advise her, what would she have made of the marriage night? If I had hoped Squire Thornton might have abstained in the light of her tender years, I was to be proven wrong.

Lady Isabella, her eyes growing wilder as she went on, recounted how Thornton had forced her that night, insisting that it was his right to use her as he wished, that Isabella must submit to him and to the law of God that put him her master.

While he was, in terms of law, correct, I have never believed that this law was intended to allow the rape of young maidens, not to tolerate such ill-treatment as she endured over the following years as he repeatedly forced her, and beat her when she would not yield to his desires, or for failing to give him a son and heir. His own part in this – knocking her down a flight of stairs, causing her to lose the babe she carried and preventing her from conceiving again – he seemed unconcerned by.

I know, unfortunately, that she is not alone in what she has undergone, but the severity of his cruelty is what broke her, what stopped her from becoming the woman she should have been. Even as she confessed this to me, the sins she had committed in hating him, in wishing him dead for so many years, I could see that something remained within her, some hope that had not yet died, but situations conspired to make this struggle far more difficult than I had experience to cope with.

I sent messengers to Thornton Hall, asking for her former maids to advise me on how best to approach this. I told them that she was, I feared, unbalanced by the death of her husband (choking on the words as I wrote them, but knowing that I must honour the sanctity of the confessional and act as if I did not know what manner of man he was, and that she had ended his life with her own hand) and asked if she had history of illness, hysteria and if they knew what could work to calm her.

I had had some success with a physick of Father Gervase's mixing, getting her to agree to drink a draught whenever the dark moods threatened to overtake her, calming her whenever she ranted and wailed at shadows, calling on her dead mother to save her.

This, it seemed, was another aspect of her sickness. In Lady Isabella's mind, her father, driven off from his home for the offence of leprosy, had abandoned her, whereas her mother, killed in the fire that destroyed their home, was a saint, spotless, the equal to the Queen of Heaven herself.

Her brother, for arranging the marriage that sold her to Thornton, she blamed for her burdens and she quickly became consumed with the desire to destroy him. I begged her to reconsider, not through any love for the man, (I had tried to get him to make confession to me while he was imprisoned in the castle, but he refused, bitterly remarking that what was the point in confessing when he was already damned?), but because I was afraid of the stain this lust for revenge would leave on her immortal soul. Her act of mariticide, though a mortal sin, had been confessed to me and could perhaps be absolved through expiation and prayer if she chose to repent, and I intended to dedicate myself to achieving this. But if she continued along the path she had set out before her now, then she would be beyond salvation.

The reply from Thornton Hall confirmed my worst fears. Her mental state had been unbalanced for a long time, and, though she could have lengthy periods of lucidity, she also flew into wild rages or sank into dark depressions and had fits of weeping and ranting from which no-one could rouse her. Her husband, in his infinite wisdom, sensitivity and understanding, had her confined to her chamber when such attacks overtook her.

If I could have, for her wellbeing, removed her to a place of calmness, perhaps made her a guest at a nunnery, I might have stood more chance. But as events progressed, I felt my chances of retrieving the Lady Isabella slipping away. Her treatment of Meg, the little girl brought before her for refusing her father's choice of suitor - a crime my lady would have committed herself, had she been able - had shown how she was capable of turning on a ha'penny when someone offended her, switching from a desire to take care of them to a need to hurt them as they had hurt her. I tried to intervene, but Lady Isabella dismissed my counsel, believing that she was merely carrying out a just sentence. And that was part of the problem; she truly believed that she was right. If the outlaws had not saved the girl, she would have been executed alongside my lady's brother.

Ah yes, the outlaws.

Lady Isabella would not divulge all the details, but she told me that she had intended to work alongside them in order to achieve a free and just Nottingham, and that they had betrayed and attacked her. The outlaw leader had tried to seduce her, she said, and then deceived and abandoned her. I saw the fury within her, saw that there was more than she was telling me, but I did not pursue it. Had she thought she loved him and he rejected her? If so, the hope of a real, true love, of seeing her fantasy of a man that would care for and protect her instead of hurting and using her, made real only to be snatched away, leaving her as alone as she has always believed herself to be, would only have pushed her further into darkness.

And so Robin Hood and his gang joined the list of those my lady wished to see destroyed, and I felt her slip further away, until at moments she became a stranger, as if she were playing a role. I watched, helpless to prevent her becoming everything she had never wanted to be.

So that she could not be hurt again, she would hurt anyone who crossed or threatened her. She would court Prince John, not from any true loyalty, but because he had power and she hoped that he would protect her. She had no real desire to commit treason against King Richard, but he was not here, anymore than her father was, and so he was just another man who had abandoned her. Why should she be loyal to him? What had he ever done for her?

I entreated her not to voice such thoughts and prayed that she would repent, but she was resolute. And so, despite my ministrations, she worsened, until I feared that she had come to resemble the villainess in some poor-quality mummer's play, the representation of a wicked Saracen knight or tyrannous warlord.

I see her now as I leave the chapel. Dressed in severe black, a savage mockery of her newly widowed status, a status she revels in from the freedom it affords her, she strides the castle, bawling out orders and demands that must be immediately carried out, or she will punish. I hardly recognise her now, she has travelled so far along this dark path. She has committed great sins, made enemies now, real, dangerous enemies who would love nothing more than to see her fall, are no doubt working now to destroy her.

I will ask her to come to confession tonight. I will try everything I can think of to help what remains of the frightened girl who has suffered so much, and I will continue to pray for her. Because if she does not change, this will not end well.

Poor child.

Poor, lost child.

___________________________________________________________________

I wrote this because I thought that there was something not quite right with Isabella from the start and although I know a lot of people aren't fans of hers (especially after Episode 13!), I thought she should have been treated a little more sympathetically, rather than being turned into a pantomime villain so quickly.

I also think there's a bit of Mercy Hartigan from the Doctor Who Xmas Special "The Next Doctor" in Isabella's character, if in a more one-dimensional 'woman scorned' way that she was sometimes reduced to.


End file.
